Analysis

On July 21, Access Economics released its forecasts for the Australian economy. It predicted Australia was through the worst of the recession.

A national campaign calling for same-sex marriage called Equal Love has been running for five years and has attracted growing support. Its focus is to shift public attitudes to gay and lesbian relationships through a campaign involving education and direct action protests.

On July 15, elders left the remote Aboriginal community of Ampilatwatja for more remote ancestral lands. They were protesting a dire lack of basic services in their community, despite repeated government promises to “close the gap” and end Aboriginal disadvantage.

International students are big business in Australia. Enrolments peaked at a record 543,898 and generated $15.5 billion in export income in 2008.

Anger at Premier Anna Bligh’s planned privatisation of $15 billion of public assets is growing, after the July 22 appointment of Rothschild, Merrill Lynch and the Royal Bank of Scotland to advise on the asset sale.

Almost immediately after the Rudd Labor government’s Fair Work Australia came into effect on July 2, the Australian and other News Ltd newspapers launched a sustained attack on the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union’s (AMWU) wage claim for the manufacturing industry.

This is the second part of an interview about breaking Australia’s addiction to coal between Green Left Weekly’s Zane Alcorn and retired Hunter Valley coal miner and climate activist Graham Brown.

The documentary film Stolen is now largely discredited. It has been in the press recently for its controversial claim that slavery still exists among Saharawis in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.

He occupied a (somewhat self-appointed) position as a hero of Australia’s environment and Indigenous rights movements for decades. Yet these days, former Midnight Oil frontman and current ALP environment minister Peter Garrett works overtime to prove his credentials as a defender of big business and the big polluters.

There they all were at the recent G8/G20 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, nodding their approval as Kevin Rudd once again announced his global carbon capture and storage institute. But in truth, the L’Aquila photo-op only highlighted the chasm between the emission cuts demanded by the climate science and the steps political leaders are willing to take.

If Obama were genuine… Top scientists and economists tell us that carbon trading (ETS — emissions trading schemes) proposals are dangerous, fraudulent ponzi schemes and that genuine, non-manipulatable, equitable carbon taxes are urgently

The 42 nations that make up the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) have called for world governments to set targets that would limit global warming to a 1.5°C increase.